Angel of Death
by Sleydo
Summary: Post-season 4 starring Castiel.


It's dark by the time I get to the hotel. Nightfall has come in over an hour ago, and it's cold enough here that Jimmy's body is trying to shiver. I suppress the involuntary movements easily and incline Jimmy's head instead so that he's looking at the top floor, and a certain room's window on the northeast side. There are no lights on, along with the rest of the building. Based on the information the Winchesters dug up for me, this place was abandoned for one of those many curious reasons humans have invented for themselves—the government taxes were too high, or perhaps there weren't enough visitors.

If I'm right, there are visitors tonight. Jimmy's weak senses tell me nothing, so I draw myself back from my tight-gripped control of the vessel for a moment, cast about on planes of perception invisible to humans. It doesn't take very long before I know that I haven't erred. The hotel has two visitors after all—or four, depending on how they're counted. Two demons, two possessed hosts.

And soon, one angel of a God that, according to my former superiors at least, is millennia dead.

I soar upwards, and let the building float past me downwards until I've reached the top floor. I pick an unoccupied room at random, someplace where the glass panes have been gone for years, and let myself in. Inside, it's even darker than out there, but in the shadows I can make out signs of human habitation years gone. A bed, stripped of everything useful but the mattress. A cabinet on the opposite wall that's had two drawers smashed in. Exposed bits of wiring poking out of the walls, some tatters of insulation with it.

There are no demons here, so it will do. I stand very still, and let myself just listen, past the noise from the world outside. At first I hear Jimmy's heartbeat, tranquil and slow despite my recent exertion. I quiet it until it stops entirely. Beneath all that, the rasp of human voices, and the ugly echoes in them that demonic possession will cause. I listen to them go through the ritual, spitting out the words of Latin with chopped-up inelegance until they are finally finished and the true communion can begin. They're more preoccupied now, less attentive to the mortal world around them. It's time to move.

I go into the corridor connecting the rooms in near-silence, the darkness and low-level ambient noise from outside masking the near-silence of my approach. It doesn't feel like a very angelic thing to do, but I've learned over the past few months hunting with the Winchesters that, as Sam told me once, 'it doesn't pay to give the bad guys anything'. A year ago I wouldn't have thought so—I would have smashed in through their window, and gone about slaughtering them without a second thought or a moment to gather intelligence, not caring whether they were expecting me or had backup waiting in another room. But then, a year ago I was a soldier in God's most holy of legions, and these days I'm sometimes not even sure what I am. Sometimes I think I'm a heretic, a fallen angel like Lucifer. Other times I think of Anna, and of the likelihood that within a few mere years from now, a handful of time even in human measurement, I will be dead. It's enough to make me feel mortal, and almost human.

The words I hear from the demons are about what I was expecting—blunt affirmatives and responses utterly devoid of useful information. At least they're distracted. I take the time to scan the room and the surrounding area in what Dean irritatingly-but-accurately refers to as 'Angel-Vision'. Again, only two demons. What I was expecting, but blood spells can distort my perceptions, and I don't want to err here.

They're two minutes into the ritual when I crash through the door. One swivels around quick enough to gasp while the other hasn't had time to react yet. Before anything else can happen, I've grabbed the quicker one by the throat and I'm pouring the holy water into his face, and down his throat. He retreats, screaming. The other one is going for some kind of weapon, but he's too slow, far too slow. I pin him down, lay my hands upon his face, and rip the demon's blackened soul apart. I wait until I see the telltale flash of light through the host's mouth and eyes before I relent.

I'm starting to get up when the human proximity senses I've only recently started paying attention to after I realized they could be incredibly useful—peripheral vision, or the way hair on the back of a human neck can feel the slight pressure changes of something moving near them, for example—tell me there's someone right behind me. I let loose with a roundhouse kick that Dean taught me a while ago and feel the crack of a human hip against my heel, suddenly in the midst of breaking. I get up and turn just in time to see the other demon collapse back onto the ground. I tense up, waiting for the predictable attack, but he doesn't do anything like that. Instead he starts babbling.

"It's him, Lord! He's here! It's Cas—"

Of course. He's still communing with whatever's on the other side of the cup. I splash more holy water into his face until his words dissolve into a rictus of screaming once again, and dispossess him before he does anything else. _Sloppy work, man, _I can almost hear Dean say. But at least both demons are dead. And by the time anything else shows up for me, I'll be hundreds of miles away. I turn to the objective.

The chalice is still sitting on the black altar where the demons left it, between the shards of infant's skulls and other bits of exotically gruesome paraphenalia only a servant of darkness would possibly collect. The chalice which they were using to communicate is familiar enough to me. It's very old, and one of a set of five, carried by demons to communicate to their kin, and requires human sacrifice in order to work. The demonic power imbued into the object glowers at me, as though waiting, and the countless screaming mouths carved across its surface don't exactly diminish the effect. The blood of one of the hosts is still there, lurking near the bottom of it. Whatever was talking to my prey is silent now, and in all likelihood has cut the connection. That is perfectly fine with me.

I kick over the black altar with a familiar rage, spill the last of the blood out of the cup, and work a blood spell of my own with it. As soon as I finish, Jimmy's angelic-tinted blood, which has filled about a third of the chalice, starts to boil. The cup begins to shake. I estimate I have about thirty seconds to leave the room, so I pull out the gasoline can and the salt, and get to work. It takes me twenty seconds to saturate the room and enough of the hallway and room I entered that there will be essentially no trace the demons were ever here, let alone me. By that time, the chalice has begun to melt, and the blood inside screeches and pops at me violently. I make a trail of gasoline to it, to make absolutely sure, and leave the can next to the remains of the altar. It takes eight more precious seconds to gather up the humans and jump out the window.

I am sure that, if Dean had come with me, he would have had something to say about the sight of an angel leaping out of a building at a speed that turned him into a blur to anything mortal, wings all but invisible to the human eye nonetheless outstretched, backlit by the hungry yellow flames devouring half of the upper floor, two humans safely in his arms. And certainly about an angel disposing of his trail with gasoline and rock salt, of all things. For the first time since I arrived at the hotel, I'm glad he's not here with me. Dean is about as heroic as he is irritating.

I land, deposit the two of them in the comfortable knowledge that neither will remember anything about where they've been for however long the demons have been possessing them, and begin the flight back towards Chicago.


End file.
